Hardware

13 Jun 2021

Adventures in hardware, part 11 - digital circuit design in Deeds
I like it when software is fun to use, and Deeds is fun! While playing around and doing the exercises from the the nand2Tetris course I’ve ended up discovering an awesome software for digital circuit …
3 min read - hardware vhdl
14 Feb 2021

Fixing Saitek Heavy Equipment Wheel
As a fan of simulator games I’ve also tried a couple of steering wheel setups. I’ve been playing truck , bus and farming simulator games recently and wanted a somewhat different wheel. The complete …
3 min read - games windows controller hardware
13 Feb 2021

Fixing laptop reboot after waking up from sleep
One of the most frustrating experiences with a computer is putting it to sleep, only to find it waking up as if it had been restarted. My ThinkPad T440p has guilty of doing exactly that every so …
4 min read - thinkpad windows debugging
06 Feb 2021

My third FPGA (for 10€)
Sipeed Tang Nano FPGA development board I like FPGA development boards and I’m excited that there are products that exist outside of the Xilinx / Intel duopoly. This branch of the Chinese …
5 min read - fpga hardware
06 Jan 2021

Wiring car instruments for fun
Car accessories as game controllers? I got inspired by the CAN BUS Gaming Simulator post on hackaday, where Leon Bataille connected a VW Polo dashboard and switches to Euro Truck Simulator 2. I’d like …
7 min read - hardware games controller
04 Jan 2021

CHIP-8 in hardware - part 3 (drawing, VGA)
In the last part I ended up with a partially working CPU with most of the single-clock instructions implemented. So far, all of the testing was done in simulator only, and it’s about time to to get a …
7 min read - emulation console fpga verilog chip8 vga
24 Dec 2020

CHIP-8 in hardware - part 2 (CPU)
Continuing with the implementation of CHIP-8 in Verilog, I wanted to continue with the CPU module and get it to actually execute some instructions, so we’ll build an instruction decoder, CPU states …
5 min read - console fpga verilog chip8 hardware
14 Dec 2020

CHIP-8 in hardware - part 1 (ALU)
I got into FPGAs with the intent of building a retro-computer. A couple of popular hardware implementation targets are Gameboy, NES, RISC-V and CHIP-8. Last year I’ve done my practice round with 6502 …
4 min read - console fpga verilog chip8 hardware
13 Dec 2020

FPGA VGA serial display
VGA on an FPGA In the previous articles I’ve mainly interfaced with LCD displays. I thought it would be nice a produce a VGA output from my FPGA board. I’ve already had a working framebuffer-based …
5 min read - verilog serial vga hardware fpga
06 Dec 2020

ModelSim and testbenches revisited
There seems to be a better way to run ModelSim than I originally described in the LCD controller post , where I was a bit lost with the tooling. (Optional) - setting up ModelSim paths If you didn’t do …
3 min read - verilog testing fpga
28 Nov 2020

Adventures in hardware, part 10 - FPGA serial display
Doom on a screen, again Recently I’ve been playing with displaying DOOM on various devices (a smart watch and a smallish IoT stick), and previously I also played with a 128x64px LCD screen connected …
3 min read - verilog serial doom lcd hardware
22 Nov 2020

Adventures in hardware, part 9 - FPGA calculator
A pocket calculator on FPGA One potato two potatoes Three potatoes, four! Five potatoes, six potatoes Seven potatoes, more! As a follow up to one of my first FPGA projects Adventures in hardware, part …
6 min read - vhdl verilog calculator hardware
31 Oct 2020

Adventures in hardware, part 8 - PS2 Keyboard Typewriter
What will we do with a drunken keyboard? What will we do with a drunken keyboard? What will we do with a drunken keyboard? Early in the morning! A sea shanty from early 19th century After I …
7 min read - fpga verilog lcd hardware
25 Oct 2020

Adventures in hardware, part 7 - Stopwatch with a memory-mapped LCD controller
I wanted to play a bit more with the 128x64 LCD display and the FPGA board, while also exploring the memory-mapping concept of the retro computers. I thought I would like the LCD to display …
6 min read - fpga verilog lcd testing hardware
16 Oct 2020

Adventures in hardware, part 6 - 128x64 display
Displaying things on a 128x64 display from an FPGA One of my FPGA boards came with a connector for a parallel-interface 12864 display, so I ordered one online, soldered 20 pins, used sample code …
7 min read - fpga verilog lcd hardware
04 Oct 2020

My First Altera FPGA
Over a month ago I bought an Altera Cyclone IV board from a local seller, it seems to be listed on Aliexpress as well. It’s marked as A-C4E6E10, and features: Altera Cyclone IV EP4CE6E22C8 FPGA chip …
6 min read - vhdl fpga hardware
01 Sep 2020

Adventures in hardware, part 4 - LED expander
Why more LEDs? During the process of developing a 4x4 keypad reader I realized I need more LEDs for diagnostic information. As my Elbert v2 has plenty of digital input/output pins, it should only be a …
2 min read - vhdl fpga hardware
07 Aug 2020

Adventures in hardware, part 3 - display and a calculator
Let’s do a calculator Let’s make a very simplistic 3-bit calculator that will: add or subtract number A and B number A is entered by DIP switches 1,2,3 number B is entered by DIP switches 4,5,6 …
4 min read - hardware vhdl fpga calculator
02 Aug 2020

Adventures in hardware, part 2 - even lower level
I’ve went through the first part of From Nand to Tetris course where I learnt to build a simple 16-bit computer called Hack from the digital building blocks (NAND gates). The course used its specific …
6 min read - hardware vhdl fpga
18 Jul 2020

Lower level adventures, part 1
Closer to the machine I started my way with programming with Microsoft QBASIC on DOS, I did try (and succeed) to copy code for a game from a BASIC book, and it did run, but I didn’t really “get” …
5 min read - hardware